Past Event

On the role of prosody and pragmatics in sentence comprehension: The processing of the ‘not-because’ scope ambiguity in English and beyond

Dr. Yukiko Koizumi
(Yamagata University and City University of New York, Graduate Center)

This talk introduces an ongoing project that aims to better understand the role of ‘non-syntactic’ factors, such as prosody and pragmatics, in sentence comprehension. How does the perceiver make use of such cues in the processing of scope ambiguity? A case illustrated here comes from the so-called ‘not-because’ sentences in English (e.g. Jane didn’t purchase the blouse because it was silk), scopally ambiguous between BEC>NOT (Jane did not buy it) and NOT>BEC (Jane bought it for some other reason) readings.

A previous reading experiment (Frazier & Clifton, 1996) had found a strong dispreference for NOT>BEC, which appears to be in conflict with an otherwise very general recency-based processing principles (e.g. Late Closure). The present study was designed to evaluate the possibility that no adjustment of the parsing model is necessitated, since the NOT>BEC reading has marked prosodic and pragmatic properties which would not be anticipated by the parser without substantial contextual support. In two self-paced reading experiments, disambiguated target constructions were presented either as main clauses or embedded in ifclauses. If-subordination was hypothesized to neutralize the marked prosodic and pragmatic properties of NOT>BEC by (a) suppressing a prosodic boundary before because and (b) reducing perceived ‘incompleteness’ by guaranteeing that another clause would follow. In Experiment 1, significantly slower processing occurred for NOT>BEC than BEC>NOT targets in main clauses, replicating previous results, but no processing time difference was evident when the construction was embedded within an if-clause. Experiment 2 followed to separate the two factors, assessing the contribution of prosody alone. All details of Experiment 1 were maintained constant except that the not-because construction displayed on a single line in Experiment 1 was now distributed over two lines. The line-break inserted before because was expected to encourage a prosodic break there, thus favoring BEC>NOT. The reading time data confirmed this, showing no sign of the if-subordination amelioration observed in Experiment 1. Thus, Experiment 2 confirms that prosody is a crucial contributor to the usual difficulty of NOT>BEC. A general conclusion drawn from these results, taken together with a follow-up production study, is that standard parsing strategies are not falsified by not-because, but may be overridden by its unusual linguistic properties, such as prosody.

Based on the findings so far for English, subsequent research project looks into the role of prosody in this type of construction in Spanish and Japanese, which I hope to also discuss in the remainder of the talk.

About the Presenter

Dr. Yukiko Koizumi holds her MA from the University of Tokyo and University College, London and her PhD from City University of New York, Graduate Center. She is currently Associate Professor at Yamagata University, Japan. Dr. Koizumi works in the field of Psycholinguistics, in particular, adult sentence processing. Her research focuses on the interface between sentence interpretation and prosody. This year she is back at CUNY to work on a new project on Spanish.